Spotlight

Dry, with a Twist

When we first met Olivia Munn, at Comic-Con in San Diego, in whose convention halls the fanboys bow down to her as queen, she was still smarting about a scolding article on the feminist Web site Jezebel that accused Comedy Central’s Daily Show of hiring her as a female correspondent largely because of her rocking bod and racy mouth. Such glossy attributes detracted and distracted from the high journalistic standards of fake news set by Jon Stewart and his jest squad. Although the Jezebel critique was more about the male culture of The Daily Show than about Munn’s starlet résumé (G4’s Attack of the Show!; the best-selling Suck It, Wonder Woman!; and the cover of Playboy), it made her sound like a beneficiary of affirmative-action babe-dom. No one puts up that squawk now. Munn has routed the doubters. Even cursed with the character name Sloan Sabbith, Munn proved to be the surprise spinal column, the sole island of calm and composure, in Season One of Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom. Her oval-faced, dark-haired, self-contained beauty was often the stable moon in an overly bustling pressure cooker where the other female characters seemed incapable of speaking without sputtering—flapping their wrists and shaking their heads like revival-meeting converts. A deadpan comedian with a wood-shaving vocal undertone, Munn also appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s sweaty summer hit, Magic Mike, and has been cast for a multi-episode arc on Fox’s winsome sitcom New Girl, where her classic sex appeal will contend for airspace with Zooey Deschanel’s gamine adorkability. Asked whether she preferred working on a sitcom or a heavy-wordage drama such as The Newsroom, Munn answered, “I think most actors just want the opportunity to do great work. And when you get that chance with people like Sorkin, Soderbergh, Stewart, it doesn’t matter if it’s a comedy or a drama, you just bust your ass and do everything you can to try to do their work justice, never, ever forgetting how lucky you are.”